With Microsoft having just completed development on two
major software releases and having recently secured a
partnership with Novell on Suse Linux, Bill Gates surely has a lot to talk
about. CNET's Ina Fried was able to interview Microsoft's founder and get his
thoughts on the recent happenings at Microsoft.

Right of the bat, the discussion turned towards Windows
Vista. The operating system went gold two weeks ago and
is due to be available to retail customers on January 30. Bill Gates was
drilled on the future of the SQL-based WinFS (Windows Future Storage). The
feature was due to ship with Vista and was later dropped altogether.

"Well, you definitely still want a structured look for
certain kinds of rich query. And if we're going to bring all these things of
e-mail and files and photos, bring it together fully, we need more than just
the search indexing. Search indexing takes you further than people expect, I
would say. But eventually you'll need more of a database-type look to these
things," said Gates.

Gates also went on to talk about the recent partnership with
Novell. "In general, Linux is not nearly as high-volume as Windows is on
servers. But (it's) significant, so customers want new kinds of
interoperability." Gates goes on to say "We've done fantastic things
on interoperability. Here, we're doing virtual machine interoperability. So you
can just have a pool of hardware and applications that use Linux, applications
that use Windows, and just have the VM manage which one needs more resource,
which one is done, which one needs to be restarted."

On the subject of Microsoft's Xbox 360 console, which now
has prime competition in the form of the Sony PlayStation 3 and
Nintendo Wii, Gates
is quite confident in the gaming platform. In fact, Gates wasted no time in
touting Microsoft's enviable one-year head start on the market. "You know,
Sony can make 80,000 bricks, and people would buy them. So the real
competition--you're going to see the impact of our innovation and all the
momentum we have in Christmas 2007. This Christmas, the story is: XBox 360 is
going to sell super-well, and they'll sell the rounding error amounts they can
make."